JCB Needed a B2B Platform to Do Some Heavy Lifting

A robust B2B platform for a construction machinery giant.

JCB is one of the top three manufacturers of construction equipment in the world. They employ over 12,000 people on four continents, selling products in 150 countries through 2,000 dealer locations. JCB engineering facilities around the world produce over 300 types of machines, while maintaining a reputation for unrivaled customer service. During their 70-year history, the family-owned company has always invested heavily in research and development, keeping JCB at the cutting edge of innovation.

In 2017, they decided to take their vast parts catalogue online for public access, making it easier for customers to do business with JCB. To do this, they needed an affordable, enterprise-level eCommerce platform with the scalability to handle their 250,000 SKUs – and handle some serious heavy lifting. JCB’s goals were to drive online revenue, while measuring their success by total traffic, conversion rate, average order value, and customer feedback. And they needed to get to market quickly. Enter Magento Commerce.

“We have empowered JCB customers to to quickly locate parts from a catalogue of 250,000 items for their machine.”

Craig Jeffery

Service and Parts Digital Innovation Manager, JCB

Now finding and buying spare parts is easy.

Together with their solution partner, iWeb, JCB focused on streamlining their customer’s journey with Magento Commerce 2. The partner introduced a range of features designed to make finding and buying spare parts easier: a parts finder allows the user to search JCB’s epic parts catalogue by serial number, part number, or model, regardless of product age. A ‘this part fits’ functionality was created, a bespoke integration that connects JCB’s catalogue to Magento, so customers can enter a part number to see if it fits their machine.

Part diagrams and image zoom reassures customers they’re choosing right part for their particular forklift or tractor, while an IP lookup customizes the information, producing location-specific pricing and languages. Next, they used a selection of third-party extensions: Worldpay and Barclaycard Payment integrations created an easy, safe, and secure online payment system, while Fooman allowed JCB to automatically attach copies of orders, invoices, shipments, and credit memos as PDFs to customers’ emails.

IMany of JCB's dealers around the world use different Dealer Management Systems (DMS) to run their business, and each system come with its own challenges. By integrating Magento with several dealer’s DMS via APIs to display stock, they allowed for customer pricing and for orders to be placed directly into the DMS. The platform’s multi-store functionality was a major plus point, allowing JCB to have independent sites for each dealer, while sharing core bespoke functionality, like the parts finder.

Integration with several of JCB’s other internal business systems was crucial to the success of the website. “Magento Commerce has been central to the success of the new JCB parts website,” said Craig Jeffery, the Service and Parts Digital Innovation Manager for JCB, who oversaw the project.

Complete customer confidence.

The website took just four months to implement, and ensured that JCB remained at the forefront of technology.. The time to find parts has been greatly reduced, giving customers complete confidence that they ordered the correct part from a genuine source. They can search for parts by part number, serial number, or even select their machine from a gallery of similar machines. A few of their dealers now have individual sites with integrations with their own ERP systems, providing a single, consistent customer journey.

Embarking on this new era of digital innovation, JCB is ready to meet the changing landscape of their customers needs. In 2018, they are currently working on more rollouts of the service to their dealer network. By using the native multi-store architecture of Magento Commerce, JCB can easily and efficiently roll out powerful online B2B experiences for their dealer network in just weeks. With Magento Commerce, JCB found an eCommerce platform just like their machinery: Robust, flexible, and ready to make the hard work look easy.